Lucid Love

Between his 1951 arrival in New York and his death in 1983, Fr. Alexander Schmemann
emerged as one of the best-known Orthodox Christian figures in this country.
As dean of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, he was pivotal
in developing that school into a world-class center of Orthodox studies. His
scholarly work made him a pioneer in the field of Orthodox liturgical theology
and the father of a eucharistic revival within the Orthodox Church. His books
and essays, most notably For the Life of the World, drew praise from
a wide range of readers, including Thomas Merton. For 30 years, Fr. Schmemann
recorded weekly sermons that were broadcast to Russia by Radio Liberty. Most
controversially, he was involved in the negotiations that resulted in the “Russian
Metropolia” being declared an autocephalous (self-governing) church by
the patriarch of Moscow.

Shortly after Fr. Schmemann’s death on December 13, 1983, the journals
he had kept for a decade were discovered in his desk. They instantly became
the objects of great curiosity and speculation. Some hoped for more insight
into the life and thought of this beloved, charismatic figure. Others hoped
to gain an insider’s view into the ecclesiastical politics and issues
of his time. Those in the latter group will be largely disappointed. The entries
published—selected and translated by Fr. Schmemann’s wife, Juliana—are
part spiritual journal, part autobiography, and part exercise book in which
Fr. Schmemann wrote down insights that might become future essays and lectures.

Summarizing these journals is not an easy task. Not only do the journals cover
the last ten years of a richly lived life, they touch upon the broad range of
Fr. Schmemann’s interests. Besides matters of theology, liturgy, church,
and seminary, there is literature, the Russian émigré experience,
politics, and the issues of the day. Central to Schmemann’s life and journals
is the joy he took from his relationships with his wife and family, his friends
and colleagues, and the people he met on his trips throughout North America,
Europe, and the Middle East.

Among the persons who figure prominently in these journals is the Russian
novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn. While still in Russia, Solzhenitsyn knew Schmemann
as “Fr. Alexander,” the priest whose radio sermons he listened to,
and “Alexander Schmemann,” whose perceptive essays on his own writing
he admired. It was not until Solzhenitsyn was exiled to the West in 1974 that
he learned that the preacher and critic were the same man. Two months later,
Solzhenitsyn invited Schmemann to Zurich, Switzerland, for what would be the
first of many encounters between the two men.

In his “Zurich Notebook,” Schmemann recounts his first visit with
Solzhenitsyn. It is filled with Schmemann’s breathless admiration for
the writer: “He is the carrier, not of Russian culture, but of Russia
itself” (p. 43). Nevertheless, the seeds of Schmemann’s future criticisms
of Solzhenitsyn are present: “The criterion of religion is the salvation
of Russia. . . . S. is hearing, grabbing, choosing what he needs
for his writing, the rest goes by” (loc. cit.).

Fr. Schmemann notes, with mounting aggravation, Solzhenitsyn’s egotistical
handling of the West. In his entry for May 30, 1975, he writes:

Another Solzhenitsyn petty scandal: he rudely refuses a TV interview, and
“will never speak in the USA” because Time did not publish
his letter to the editors. Narrow-mindedness, suspicion, fanaticism. How many
more times will he be burned before he understands? Will he ever understand?
(p. 80)

But his major criticism is Solzhenitsyn’s “idolizing obsession
with Russia” (p. 65). “For [Solzhenitsyn] there is only Russia.
For me, Russia could disappear, die, and nothing would change in my fundamental
vision of the world. ‘The image of the world is passing.’ This tonality
of Christianity is quite foreign to him” (p. 61).

The journal records Schmemann’s reactions to some of the religious and
social issues that emerged in the 1970s. Some sound “off the cuff,”
such as his gut response to the 1976 Episcopal Convention’s decision to
ordain women: “A low-level egalitarianism, cowardice before the contemporary
world. Nothing deep or genuine. The fact alone that there was a vote. . . !”
(p. 127). Others, such as his engagement with what we now term “gender
issues,” are the fruit of his long experience as a thinker, spiritual
father, and culture critic:

Homosexuality. The question is not whether is it natural or unnatural, since
this question is generally inapplicable to fallen nature, in which—and
this is the point—everything is distorted, everything, in a sense, has
become unnatural. (p. 175)

A man’s holiness and a man’s creativity are, above all, the
refusal, the denial of the specifically “male” in him. In holiness,
a man is least of all a male. (p. 272)

It is totally impossible to solve anything with the world’s fixation
on “rights.” . . . Christianity consists in being
right and conceding, and in doing so letting victory triumph: Christ
on the Cross and “truly, this is the Son of God.” (p.
55)

Another recurring theme in these journals—and in Schmemann’s writings
and lectures—is his critique of the Church and his criticism of religion.
As a churchman, he scrutinizes the Church with “lucid love”—a
term he coined to describe Solzhenitsyn’s criticism of tsarist Russia
in August 1914. He is often frustrated by what he terms the “humanity”
of the Church, her incarnation as a corruptible institution comprising sinful
human beings in a fallen world. He laments Orthodoxy’s “absence
of a criteria for self-criticism” (p. 47) and excoriates his church’s
“morphophobia”: “Orthodoxy has ceased to be interested in
dogmas, in the content of faith. It is rather the denial of change. . . .
A new situation is bad because it is new. This a priori denial does
not allow an understanding of change, to evaluate it in the context of the faith,
to ‘meet’ it realistically” (p. 29). However, Fr. Schmemann
always criticizes the Church as one who stands within her. His journals
are frequently punctuated with his exclamations of joy in the Liturgy and in
his meetings and fellowship with his brother priests, and with lay people at
conventions, conferences, and retreats—what he terms “contact with
the essence of the Church” (p. 288). He affirms the necessity of the Church:
“The humanity of the Church is a lesser temptation than a pan-spirituality,
than all attempts to disincarnate the Church,” he warns (p. 77). And his
warnings ring prophetic: “The individual, the person who does not accept
the Church distorts Christianity, transforming it into spiritual narcissism
and selfishness” (p. 278).

If Fr. Schmemann’s love for the Church is everywhere evident, his disdain
for religion is also obvious. By religion Schmemann meant the reduced
and reductionist religion of the modern secular culture: religion that has ceased
to be “the essential form of life” (p. 63). Such religion is reduced
to being one isolated compartment in a life lived with little, if any, reference
to God. “There is no point in converting people to Christ,” he writes,
“if they do not convert their vision of the world and of life, since Christ
then becomes merely a symbol for all that we love and want already—without
Him” (p. 16). Worship is reduced to producing certain sentimental feel-ings
and prayer to the cultivation of those feelings. “The spiritual
people . . . reduced the Church to religion, and religion to
themselves” (p. 186). The Church’s mission is reduced to fulfilling
the manifold tasks assigned to it by the world (secularism) and to meeting the
desires and stroking the egos of its adherents (consumerism). “I sometimes
have the feeling that most of the people, unknown to themselves, really live
by hiding from reality . . . and find this hiding to be the essential
function of religion” (p. 114). Such religion is far-removed from the
life and mission of the Church: “Christianity, in its essence, is not
so much the fulfillment as the denial and destruction of religion . . .”
(p. 202). Against religion, Schmemann holds up what were his three favorite
theological themes—the Eucharist, ecclesiology, and eschatology. (Indeed,
the central role of eschatology in the thought of Fr. Schmemann merits a major
theological study.)

Above all, Fr. Schmemann’s journals are permeated with joy and gratitude.
For Fr. Schmemann, Eucharist was not a ritual to be performed or a
subject to be studied; it was a defining characteristic of the life of a Christian.
In his lectures, Fr. Schmemann would state that the worst criticism of Christianity
was Nietzsche’s accusation that Christians “have no joy.”
“The source of all false religion is the inability to rejoice, or, rather,
the refusal of joy; whereas, joy is absolutely essential because it is without
any doubt the fruit of God’s presence. One cannot know that God exists
and not rejoice. Only in relation to joy are the fear of God and humility correct,
genuine, fruitful. Outside of joy they become demonic. . . .
Somehow, ‘religious’ people often look on joy with suspicion”
(p. 129). Those who knew Fr. Schmemann, and those who read these journals, recognize
that he lived his life in the key of joy. Six months before his death from cancer,
he wrote the last entry published here: “What happiness it has all been!”

L. Joseph Letendre teaches at St. Callistus School in
Chicago.

L. Joseph Letendre teaches history and writing and is a parishioner at All Saints Orthodox Church in Chicago.

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